LHC scare stories were good for science

By Valerie Jamieson

YOU would have thought it was the final moments of the World Cup. An estimated 1 billion people were glued to their television screens. Nearly 6000 newspaper articles discussed the event and the blogosphere was buzzing with anticipation. T-shirts were made, Google changed its logo for the day, and people placed their bets. Only it wasn’t soccer that people around the globe were so enthralled by – it was a beam of protons.

The protons’ lap around the 27-kilometre circumf-erence of the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, was the talk around water coolers everywhere. Coverage of the event even bumped the US election into second place.

But would the LHC have enjoyed the same media coverage if a handful of critics hadn’t spread absurd claims that the particle smasher would create a black hole and swallow up the Earth? Surely not. The apocalyptic scenario had even the least science-curious minds wondering exactly what was going on deep underground at CERN on the French/Swiss border. These accusations brought the LHC into the everyday parlance of hundreds of millions of people who had never heard of the accelerator, or CERN, or protons.

The situation has delighted and dismayed physicists in equal measure. JoAnne Hewett of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in Menlo Park, California, sums it up best. “We all enjoyed sharing our enthusiasm for the science,” she says. “However, I don’t have anything good to say about the news coverage of impending doom from black hole production. It was just plain inaccurate sensationalism.”

In the days running up to the switch-on, the media was quick to devote

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